(Just Enough) Modeling for Business Analysts
3 days
Description
Nowadays in many organizations business-analysis modeling has fallen out of fashion, usually from the misguided assumption that it is "not agile". Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, experience shows that modeling significant helps a team to rapidly develop high-quality, testable systems on an agile project.
This course teaches participants how to model quickly and effectively to elicit, capture, and communicate requirements for a business system. Participants will actually develop business-analysis models for a real business application using the best subset of modern modeling practices for business analysis.
Contents
In this course we will cover:
Modeling overview
- What modeling is
- Why modeling is necessary for efficient business analysis
- Quick tour of the business models
- How the business models work together
- Are there any business requirements that don't fit into a model?
Context model
- Overview of context modeling
- Context-modeling notation
- Actors
- Actor roles
- Kinds of information flows / messages
- What is "the system"?
- Determining system scope
- The organization itself as a system
Business-event modeling
- Events in business systems
- Business event characteristics
- Types of business event
- Business event threads
- Business event recognition
- Organizing events for review
- Business events lead to use cases
Use case model
- Charactieristics of a good use case
- Use-case notation
- The use case template
- Use case narrative
- Use cases as a repository of business functionality requirements
- Factoring use cases
- Include and extend constructs
Class modeling
- The class-association model and entity-relationship model
- Modling classes and associations
- The class model as a repository of business information and knowledge requirements
- Finding good classes
- Associations
- Attributes
- Subclasses and superclasses
- Modeling business roles: static / dynamic, single / multiple
- How to express business derivation rules
- How to express business constraint rules: Invariants and cardinality
State modeling
- Why state-transition diagrams are needed for business analysis
- States
- Transitions
- Business rules: Guards on transitions
- Connection between state model and event / use case models
- Connection between state model and class model
Prototyping as an analysis tool
- When to use prototyping?
- Benefits of prototyping
- Dangers of prototyping
- What should be prototyped?
- What kind of fidelity is best?
- Capturing units of work with a prototype
Window / page specification
- How far should a business analyst go in specifying the user interface?
- Standards and style guides
- Navigation diagramming
- Specifying other window and page behavior